Banana Republic Justice: Behind The Scenes Of The Pirate Bay Trial

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Corruption

Corruption

Process of law failed on so many accounts in the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person that it’s hard to get a bird’s-eye view. This trial was characterized by first deciding that the operations were criminal, then finding somebody to punish, and finally trying to determine a criminal act they could be held accountable to. In any civilized country where process of law works, the exact reverse order is followed.

First, we know that the United States ordered the shutdown and trial of The Pirate Bay. This was confirmed by Swedish Public Television, showing how the then-Swedish Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström had been in contact with the US State Department through intermediaries.

Then, in the raid on May 31, 2006, the Police emptied an entire server hall and didn’t just seize The Pirate Bay. In an apparently deliberate attempt to create a public fear of association, almost 200 mom-and-pop stores got their servers seized in collateral damage. The copyright lobby’s reps were quoted as saying, “you should be careful with where you place your servers”. (Later, some constitutionally protected servers – registered news publications – were actually given back, but not before a judge had intervened hard. Other servers, such as The Pirate Bureau’s discussion forum, remained in seizure.)

To further create a fear of association, the police harassed the site’s legal counsel by forcibly sampling and registering their DNA for any and all future use.

The lead investigator with the Police for the case, Jim Keyzer, was hired by Warner Brothers, one of the plaintiffs, before finishing the investigation and while still on notice with the Police, and was already hired by Warner when conducting the hearings and wrapping up the investigation. This is a textbook bribe, which is why you will find many Swedish blogs referring to “the bribed policeman Jim Keyzer” (den mutade polisen Jim Keyzer). The Swedish then-Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask commented on the case: “it’s positive that our policemen are hired from outside the Police Authority. That indicates they’re attractive”.

The presiding judge in the District Court, Tomas Norström, picked the case to himself. This is not supposed to be possible, but he argued that his court department (which specialized in copyright monopoly cases) should have the case, and he just happened to be the only available judge there. Norström was a signed-up member in the Swedish Association For Copyright, just like all the plaintiffs were, as well as a board member in The Swedish Association for Protection of Intellectual Property, giving him a political as well as a possible social interest in the outcome of the case and making him textbook corrupt. (This is why you see a lot of Swedish blogs discuss “the corrupt judge Tomas Norström”.)

In the investigation, the two operators of The Pirate Bay were initially indicted. For some reason, its media spokesperson Peter Sunde, which had openly talked back to the copyright industry, was indicted too despite having done nothing but talking, and a fourth completely unrelated person was indicted more or less because he was rich and could be ruined as a warning to others, to create yet more fear of association. (This would not be the official reason, but the obvious reason to everybody else.)

During the trial, the defense pointed out that it had not been proven that any crime had been committed at all which the four were on trial for aiding and abetting. (Sharing culture is fully legal in many countries, and the prosecution hadn’t cared to show that a criminal act had been committed – only that sharing of culture had happened somewhere, but not that it was illegal in that location. If it had happened in Spain at the time, for instance, it would have been fully legal.) The prosecution agreed with the fact that no crime had been proven to have been committed in the first place, and then, that quite crucial fact magically vanished from the end verdict, where they were found guilty of aiding and abetting that non-shown crime.

And the media spokesperson, Peter Sunde? He was convicted for part in operating The Pirate Bay based on a load balancer he had placed in a server rack, a box that had not had a single wire attached to it in The Pirate Bay’s server hall, and which was configured for something completely different than The Pirate Bay. Documentation of this configuration had gone completely missing from the investigation where everything else was meticulously documented.

The judges in the Appeals Court denied a retrial in the District Court based on the charges of a biased judge. Those judges had been part of the same pro-copyright political organization as Tomas Norström, and didn’t see any bias.

Nobody paid much attention to the appeals trial in the Appeals Court, as the landmark case was expected to go to the Supreme Court. It was the middle act in a three-act play. Still, in the Appeals Court, not one but two of the judges had a background from the same kind of pro-copyright lobby organizations as the District Court’s Norström. They confirmed the District Court’s verdict of guilty of aiding and abetting the crime that was never shown to have taken place.

Then, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. At that point, the four people went into exile.

This is just a small subset of the things that are… remarkable… about the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person.

Sweden has a justice system unworthy of a banana republic. When the establishment is threatened, or when the US of A calls for Sweden to jump, all rights and due process go out the window.

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About The Author: Rick Falkvinge

Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. He has a tech entrepreneur background and loves whisky.

These guys are a bunch of morons.
Soon people will fear downloading anything in the developed world. If the dont “pirate stuff” they dont need these uber high speed connections at all, so if the RIAA and MPAA manage to stop “piracy” then oh well they severly lower deman for bandwitdh and will kill the telecommunications industry. “Piracy” accounts for 40% of the total bandwidth usage in the world today. so my friends in the developed world be patient you guys will be rescued by the ISP’s themselves coz if they dont, then eventually they will die.

the problem is, ISPs along with search engines like Google, seem to be much more concerned with trying to do whatever they can to please the entertainment industries. that isn’t working. it has been seen to not be working. whatever any other industry that uses the Internet does that the entertainment industries asks them to do, no sooner is it done than the industries are back demanding more. at no time is anyone, any industry giving a flying toss about the most important part of all this and that is the CUSTOMERS! regardless of what the industry is, it cannot survive let alone progress or even remain profitable without them!

Actually Facebook could well sell services of directed brain-washing to the same diabolical guys so I think they’d rather not take down Facebook. Facebook is potentially much more effective as a brain washing mechanism than traditional TVs are. Since you can adapt the brain-washing to the subjects own interests. Probably more effective on most.

I am ecuadorian. I do not feel offended by this expression. In fact:
– we export bananas…the best in the World…hence we are a banana republic.
– Jualian Assange is our guest
I understand dondilly’s comment as: It is best to be a banana republic that feeds the World and hosts activists (Ecuador) than to be a totalitarian state that persecutes its people (Sweeden).

Thank you for reading, commenting, and taking the time to respond. May I contact you for further opportunities to highlight the injustices here, as well as alternate descriptions (such as the excellent letter you published at Christian Engström and on TorrentFreak)?

Of course you are most welcome to contact me. The matter has become so much more than a personal, within-family one for me during these 6 1/2 years that have passed now since the first raid to PRQ and TPB. Realizing that the raid was only the beginning of a new kind of society in which all of us are becoming more and more monitored and our movements more and more restricted is scaring. People like you who manage to reach out in revealing this disastrous development to others are important, indeed.

so, with all this ‘evidence’ available, why has no one gone to the EUCJ or EUCHR? according to the article, surely Sweden are in breech of it’s own laws, let alone any others. and as for the USA, we all know what an arsehole Nation that has turned into! i would still like to know exactly what the USA has over al,most every other country in the World that it can use to force the various governments to go totally against their own citizens in favour of backing USA industries that actually give nothing to those other countries. whatever it is, it’s frightening. i just hope losing all freedom and privacy just about everywhere is worth it just to be able to pay them to watch the next Hollywood blockbuster!!

Please don’t blame the US as a whole. The majority of US citizens do not condone this sort of thing.
The US simply provides a legal environment where this sort of thing can happen. The copyright industry is primarily to blame.

Condone.. yes they do. They vote for the fuckwits that perpetrate this shit.. so im sorry we blame them all. Until you wake the fuck up and go and educate your fellow American citizens we will continue to lump you all in as complete braindead fuckwits.

Living in the USA, I agree. We are complicit. We know what must be done but choose to live in denial so we can continue about our day without having to deal with the inmates that run this asylum. We let them do their thing, and point their guns at us to take our money to be able to pay themselves To do their thing… and we do our thing and pretend that they aren’t doing it in our name and with our money. Good luck educating people who are basking in denial! It is like trying to convince a North Korean to admit that the Great Leader is a really shitty dictator, or trying to talk logically to a diehard religious person. It won’t work.

Citizens do not vote in those politicians really. The political system in the US is so controlled these days that small/honest people don’t have a chance to get into office. A person cannot make it as a candidate without the backing of a political party. Even once they’re in they have to toe the party line for several years before anyone will listen to or support them. That process weeds out anyone who isn’t there for money or power.

Warner Brothers bribed the U.S. politician Joe Biden who did the dirty work. I think Warner Brothers owns Time-Warner cable internet also. Time-Warner cable internet wants excuses to limit internet use and keep charging high prices. It is all for increasing profit/greed. Another example of corporate greed without regard to human lives. The American people will eventually push these bad guys and bad corporations out of our society by not buying their products and changing copyright laws.

Yeah, right. As if you would have any choice. 1. there will be a duo-monopoly, just like there is now, and you only get to pick between two companies/organizations, that work together and against you, and 2. if you don’t buy any of them, they will calculate it as a “loss”… deform that to “theft”… and voila! Off to the gulag/guantanamo with you!

Never forget this one thing: There is only one law. That of the jungle.
Everything else is paper, and only valid, as long as the strongest one in the jungle approves of it.

The point where democracy wins over other forms of government, is that it is bettar at concealing that fact.

Time-Warner was bought out by News Ltd (aka the diabolical Rupert Murdoch who comprehensively trashed the UK and is in the process of doing the same thing to the US). So sorry to the world on behalf of all Australians to have inflicted this horrendous excuse for a human being. Oh well, to make up for it we also have the anti-Murdoch, Julian Assange.

I immigrated to Sweden and purchased a house there in a village. Two notorious thieves (family of eachother) with criminal records stole things from my house when I was not there. As soon as they started to fear I would go to the police, both filed separate instances of me threatening them and hitting them.

Here’s what followed:

– I was taken from my bed at night by the police, put in a car and driven to a city far away. My wife was not told where I was taken to, neither was I given opportunity to take money or my phone with me.

– I was put in a jail cell without opportunity to contact anyone.

– I was tortured in the sense that I was made unable to sleep through a light that was on and made a loud buzzing noise.

– I was denied an attorney of my own choice, in spite of the fact that I requested that. The attorney assigned to me ignored several of my emails with strong supporting evidence in my favor and later admitted she hadn’t read anything.

– One of the two police complaints against me was kept secret until two weeks before the trial.

– There were no witnesses so it was my word against their word, but in the judgement it said: “In principle, when someone files a police complaint, there is no reason to doubt the statements made to the police”.

– I did not get a jury of my peers but a jury of four local politicians.

I was found guilty. Even though I am 100% innocent, I now have a criminal record and can therefore never emigrate to a non-EU country. I was convicted not because there was any evidence that I did it, but because they believed the word of two criminals over my word.

In Sweden, I set up a business and the tax I paid last year was over half a million kronor. Of course, I have left Sweden in a hurry as soon as I was convicted (I was fined a lot of money and had to pay the thieves money as well).

I want to strongly warn anyone contemplating emigrating to Sweden that if you ever get accused of a crime, that you might end up in a situation where the principle of innocent until proven guilty is shoved aside. There have been many more mistakes made in my case. Swedes are incredibly naive and assume that “where is smoke, is fire”. Meaning, if you get accused of something, there must be some truth in it and they’ll somehow find a way to punish you.

Think of corruption as a convenience tax to have elected officials that make decisions for us; you will never have zero corruption. With that said a lot of corrupt US moguls and politicians look like sissy-boys compared to their international equivalents.

I’m glad I live in the US. What happened to Stefan in the comment above would never happen here.

Incorrect. There was a gentleman who was imprisoned for over 14 months before release and even the Judge admitted there is no reason he should have been in jail. All becuase he would not license his new technology to an engery company.

One can read a answer from the Appeals Court on why Google is not guilty but why they consider the pirate bay guilty. They said that the “majority” usage of the site was illegal, and thus the site creators is guilty and google is not.

This is for me very interesting since suddenly, its the users of a site that determine if the creators should go to jail. Its users.

Yes. I have also seen this. So anyone could load a bunch of nasty and/or illegal crap to any service with the intent of having it taken down. That can be so misused, and that may well be what they are aiming for. They want to deliberately upload shit, then put the blame on the pirates and get the sites shut down.

This is a bit reminiscent of the case against (DVD-) Jon Lech Johansen in Norway concerning the CSS encryption for DVDs. After being asked to by the RIAA, Norwegian police raided Johansens home and confiscated computer equipment – including stuff crucial to his dad’s business.

In the trial, the prosecution tried very hard to identify a law that Johansen had actually broken, they tried something on the privacy of letters, basically charging Johansen for breaking into “letters” addressed to himself (remember, his “crime” was to watch DVDs he had bought in the store). In the end this became too preposterous for Norwegian courts, and I think only the prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde (who later have gone on to say that giving the music industry police authority is “unproblematic”) and legal expert witness Jon Bing (who, guess what, happens to consult for the copyright industry) still think it should be illegal to read one’s own letters.

Anyway – the take home points is that: a) courts and police are more than happy to run the errands of the rich and mighty, and b) the rich and mighty are happy to use courts and police to harass anybody who don’t properly kow-tow to their wealth and might. And that lawyers and lawmakers generally are more interested in supporting the copyright industry (and thus get a share of the wealth), than abstract things like individual people’s rights.

the biggest problem is, regardless of what we say here, regardless of how we feel about the way countries are doing whatever they can to please the entertainment industries and screw their own citizens, it is not going to change for the better. that is because their are either no politicians that are not receiving ‘incentives’ to ignore the plight of the people or, in the rare case that a politician or two does try to do something positive for the people, they are prevented from doing so by those others that are receiving the incentives. add to that the obvious bias that exists of the judges that are ruling on copyright cases, whilst at the same time being active members in some form or other of copyright ‘bodies’ and the chance of change is all but eliminated. dont forget the deaths in WWII to prevent this type of government and corporate monitoring and take over. we are now in the position of having, without any fight now, of the very thing fought so hard against. where is the sense in that? Sweden isn’t alone but it is certainly one of the main players in this crap! so, so sad!!

I suspect the true culprit here is the Social Control Mechanism, of which Hollywood is (was) a potent branch. No: It’s not America. No: It’s not Sweden. It is the elite trying to keep hold of their propaganda arm. The internet got too free.

The worst thing about it is that as valuable as the Pirate Bay is (was), Demonoid had become the greatest repository of culture in the history of the world, with the obvious exception of archive.org.

The only way to combat the monopolists is for people to offer their original media content for free on archive.org – The Internet Archive – as I am doing. This way we stand the chance of sharing and partaking in real culture, as opposed to industrial-era indoctrination. Our greatest obstacle – lack of funding – is becoming less and less of a concern, with the continuing advancement of technology and the easier and simpler production techniques which it affords.

One of the best pieces of blogactivism by Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, first of many.

I think it is really great that while we hear week-to-week basis about new Pirate Parties founded here and there, the founding fathers dont let go of the original copy – the bunch of guys who didnt want theory – who wanted practice – and not for them, or their friends, or Swedes, or Scandinavians, or Europeans – no – but for All.

[…] court system in Sweden is bought and paid for lock, stock, and barrel on these matters, as we have seen before. Troberg hints that you don’t win the war by valiantly dying in battle for your country […]

The US Federal Government should be worried about China’s sabotaging of the nation’s entire infrastructure, not these hackers, programmers, and engineers who can outsmart governments worldwide, just over free spread of information….

wtf r you talking about?… ahh yeah i forgot… the americans are still painting the horrible picture of the communist threat…

I LOVE COMMUNISM! THE IDEA OF THE GOVERMENT SEEING TO EVERY NEED OF ITS CITISENS! THAT EVERY HUMAN BEING IN THAT COUNTRY IS WORTH THE SAME!
There would be no multibillion dollar private companies that would kill its citisens for a few easy extra bucks…

now that communism has been exploited and missused by tyrants and dictators thats a totally different matter.

Long Live TPB! Almost IF NOT the only stand up group that has been here since the start with Napster, fighting and still fighting for everyones voice on the internet!

If you did not know. The internet was suposed to be used by the defence agencies and goverments around the world. It was never intended for the kind of freedom we enjoy today and take for granted.

They see that this so called “file sharing” is out of control when in reality i would almost go as far as saying that they are attacking our freedom of speech. They want to take back the control over the internet.

Can you take a step back and even begin to imagine how the internet would be like without TPB? ALL Bittorrent sites gone… nowhere to dl a song without paying for it first. Imagine all the forums with their special “Goverment moderators” where you cant even speak a negative word about your local politician or local super market at that matter. Just like it is in the US at this moment, Today! YOU are not allowed to speak a bad word about a company, any company. Not even the goverment. If you do and someone from the company or the goverment hears you… then beware because you will get sued for slander and they will bankrupt you and destroy your entire life. Or the FBI will come knockin and down to Guantamo Bay we go. AAhhh yeah! USA! THE LAND OF OPORTUNITY! HA HA HA

Its finally time for TPB to hit the companies with their own club! Use their own rules against them! Now we shall see what the copyright companies and Hollywood will do! They made the laws! They try to censur the way of live of modern day human beings! NOW WILL THEY ABIDE BY THEIR OWN LAWS!? WILL THEY LEAD BY EXAMPLE!? nah…. they will do what they always do.. just fuck the public opinion and do whatever they want to, because as all the goverments know.. individuals and small groups in the society have no power and we can bully them as we like aslong as they are divided and belive what we tell them.

Cant wait to see what happens.

I just had the best or worst idea of my life…

dont think its possible.. but maybe.. just maybe.. with the help of TPB and their friends, Everybodys friends across the globe…

Cant we start a name/protest list thats open to the entire population of the world and you can only register your name/vote once…

There is something about the idea… IF 80% of the inhabitants of this planet that use internet would unite and speak as one… I hope i will live until then if it ever comes to pass. That day would be Epic

The Voice of The People has spoken.. what would all the companies and countries in the world do?

As i said, I dont even know if this is possible with todays technology.. But if there is something that TPB has shown us and the rest of the world its that if there is a will there is a way!

[…] example – the movie TPB AFK by Simon Klose, a movie that documented the banana-republic level miscarriage of justice that was the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a […]

[…] example – the movie TPB AFK by Simon Klose, a movie that documented the banana-republic level miscarriage of justice that was the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a […]

[…] an example – the movie TPB AFK by Simon Klose, a movie that documented the banana-republic level miscarriage of justice that was the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a […]

[…] example – the movie TPB AFK by Simon Klose, a movie that documented the banana-republic level miscarriage of justice that was the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a […]

[…] example – the movie TPB AFK by Simon Klose, a movie that documented the banana-republic level miscarriage of justice that was the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a […]

[…] example – the movie TPB AFK by Simon Klose, a movie that documented the banana-republic level miscarriage of justice that was the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a […]

[…] copyright monopoly from sharing culture freely, and all of them convicted (as we know that courts can’t be trusted in this field). Ten people out of four million sharing culture on an everyday basis, directly or […]

[…] you know the dice are loaded. You could be as much in the moral and legal right as you wanted; we know since before that the court system in Sweden is hopelessly corrupt when it comes to copyright […]

[…] sociopolitical elite has come down on this individual like a ton of bricks, from the thoroughly banana-republic corrupt Pirate Bay trial, via a very strange extradition from a country without such an agreement which […]

About The Author

Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. He has a tech entrepreneur background and loves whisky.